Community-Led Innovation
The Solo Brands story begins in 2011 when the platform’s first – and still largest – brand, Solo Stove, was founded by two brothers seeking to bring family together. The Solo Stove team combined a love of the outdoors with a passion for e-commerce to create a digitally native platform designed to market the Solo Stove Lite, an ultralight portable backpacking camp stove that can boil water in under 10 minutes using only twigs, sticks and leaves.
From the company’s earliest days, the Solo Stove team worked hard to establish a DTC model that could create direct customer connection and facilitate real-time customer feedback – leveraging data to inform and improve the company’s product innovation roadmap, direct digital marketing decisions and enhance the overall brand experience. Customer requests inspired the successful design and launch of the company’s iconic fire pit line in 2016, and regular feedback from customers similarly informed the launch of several Solo Stove accessories that followed.
Today, the Solo Brands portfolio includes innovative products and technologies across a growing list of categories. From Solo Stove’s virtually smokeless fire pit, to ISLE’s portable inflatable paddle boards, to Oru’s folding kayak and Chubbies’ high-performance apparel, the company has worked to build a product portfolio defined by a strong emotional connection to customers. This community connection – and the proprietary customer insights that result – helps enhance Solo Brands’ ability to launch and scale innovative new products with high confidence, and importantly, to drive attractive repeat purchasing behavior.
The goal is to design, build or acquire products to serve the expanding Solo Brands community throughout their daily lives, whether at home, on the go, or in the outdoors, spanning multiple usage occasions and across all seasons.